CT prosecutors unveil plan to increase fairness across state criminal justice system

Chief State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin on Thursday announced a new strategic plan to increase accountability and fairness across the state’s criminal justice system while encouraging prosecutors to keep more offenders out of the system entirely through expanded use of diversion programs.

What the Division of Criminal Justice is calling a blueprint for Moving Justice Forward is being rolled out simultaneously with another first for state prosecutors: A set of Connecticut Prosecution Standards written to ensure a uniformity of processes and case outcomes across the state’s 13 prosecutorial districts.

“We are trying to instill in the public confidence in the criminal justice system as a whole, but in particular in the Division of Criminal Justice,” Griffin said. “When justice is taken from you, you know it. It is like air, like oxygen.”

The blueprint has 10 goals that include the use and development of rehabilitation programs as alternatives to prosecution, recruitment efforts with new diversity goals, better data collection and more transparent reporting of data, enhanced prosecutor training and replacement of outdated computer equipment used in most offices.

The new, uniform prosecution standards, something that has been discussed for decades, is intended to eliminate differences in how prosecutorial offices charge and sentence in similar cases while serving as a procedural guide.

The newly published standards also give prosecutors more latitude in deciding when not to press a charge. Charging decisions have at times in the past been driven by police arrests and filings by court clerks.

In practical terms, Griffin said the standards will provide valuable direction for what has become an ever younger group of prosecutors in a Division of Criminal Justice depleted in recent years by a wave of retirements of senior lawyers.

Since May, Griffin said the division has hired 39 new prosecutors, while a decade or two ago, the division might hire two new prosecutors a year. The division is authorized to employ 250 prosecutors and now employs 219

The blueprint was four years in development and financed in large part by a $500,000 charitable grant from the Herbert & Nell Singer Foundation. Division officials said they will need additional charitable giving and more money from the legislature to meet all 10 of its goals.

The proposals are the result of months of study by stakeholders in the state criminal justice system, including prosecutors, judges, police, a convict, defense attorneys and victims’ rights advocates.

Participants examined state’s attorney’s offices in Hartford, New Britain, New London; they sat in on prosecution conferences and studied issues such as case initiation, charging, plea-bargaining, sentencing, bail, prosecutor caseloads, training and development and communications with law enforcement and the community.

“Transformation comes with reflection and urgency,” said Theron Pride, one of the participants and a managing director of the Center for Justice Innovation. “This is what Moving Justice Forward looks like.”